Walking to the door, Mysvain popped in his ear-plugs, gesturing to Fel to do the same before swinging the door wide.

They walked through the apocalyptic landscape towards a neglected corner of the inner zone. Most of the area had well-maintained flora, coming in the form of lightning trees, grass and flowers, that ate up the lightning bolts like a tasty treat, but the corner they headed towards was different. Unlike the well-tended to shrubbery before, the corner was more of a wilderness than anything, with dense bushes and scraggly trees. The only way through it was an overgrown dirt path.

“Hey, Mysvain, you sure we’re going the right way?”

“Oh yeah, don’t worry, I just like being alone.”

“There doesn’t seem to be many people around though?”

“There are, they’re just good at staying out of sight.” Mysvain pointed over to a garden in the distance, “Look over there.”

“It’s, a garden?”

“No, no, by the tree,” he said while pointed to the only tree in the area.

Squinting his eyes, Fel spotted a crouched figure, only barely visible, watering the plants with a yellowish liquid, “I see, but why would you care if they’re people around if you don’t notice them?”

A quick glare from Mysvain shut him up.

After breaking through the neglected bush, they were invited by the sight of a clean pagoda, “So, how’s this place so clean compared to the rest of the place?”

"I've got a few automatons to clean the place up, I have at least some self-esteem y’know?"

“Can’t you get them to clean up,” Fel pointed to the jungle behind him, “That?”

Walking up to the door, Mysvain turned back to Fel, “Here’s a question. Would you approach a place surrounded by something that looks like that?”

“No.”

“That’s the point.”

He then turned back to the door, unlocked it and walked through it with Fel following closely behind. Looking around, Fel saw it was neat and tidy, without a thing out of place. Except for an untitled book that lay on a table. Walking by the table, Fel stealthily flipped through it.

It took only a few seconds for him to slowly close the book and leave it be. There were many kinds of people in the world. Damn weeb.

Thankfully, Mysvain didn’t notice the understanding look that Fel wore on his face and continued to unsuspectingly make his way towards the basement. The basement, unlike the floors above, was a mess. Runed metal plates were heaped up in towering piles while half-finished prototypes lined the walls. There were a few workbenches scattered about the place, but only the one in the centre had anything more than bits and bobs on it.

Mysvain went to a pile of runed plates and adjusted it a little, forming something that resembled a seat, “Sit here and just watch me work or something. I’ll just explain how everything works as I go.”

He then walked to the workbench and picked up a half-finished spherical object, “This is the project I’ve been working on for the past year or two, the chaos sphere. I’m not too talented when it comes to combat, but with the death invasion approaching, I thought I'd better be prepared.”

“Wait, death invasion?”

“You don’t even know about that? Well, you don’t need to know it for now. Let’s continue.”

“I feel that I should-”

“-So, this thing is supposed to hover about and shoot lightning at selected targets. Of course, I should be able to control it manually too.”

Fel stood up and leaned over Mysvain’s shoulder, getting a better look at the sphere. It was rather large, almost double the size of a watermelon. It lacked any outer plating, allowing for Fel to see its innards, that comprised hundreds of thin, runed plates with a few black marbles set into it and an empty core in the centre. Strangely, there didn’t seem to be any moving parts.

“How does this work?”

Mysvain, noticing Fel leaning over the shoulder, quickly shuffled away, “The runes manipulate the natural energy to do various things. The plates are bunched up in groups, packets if you will, each with their own purpose.”

He pointed to a block of plates to the back of the sphere, “That one’s in charge of the hovering part, it still needs a little work and can hardly even stay in the air.”

“How does it hover anyway?”

“The basic idea is to hook onto the energy plane with the four nodes you can see in the corners,” he said pointing to the black marbles. Mysvain glanced at Fel and found that Fel had a lost look on his face, “Did you learn nothing about Mages?”

“Pretty much.”

Facepalming, Mysvain gave a brief explanation, “This is rather important, but I’ll only say it once. Natural energy comes from the energy plane, a plane that overlaps our world. The higher level you get, the closer you can get to the energy plane and the more power you can draw from it. We level 1 Mages can only see a few nodes in the air, but I’ve heard Level 2 Mages can see streams of energy in the air. Although Mages can only the energy they have an affinity with.”

Fel glanced around the room, seeing twinkling blue points, similar to what he saw in the temple. As expected, he could only see pure energy.

“So how do these nodes work?”

“Dunno, found them in a ruin somewhere and they just, happened to work that way. I put them under a microscope and found thousands of runes packed in them, how on earth their creator did that, I have no idea.”

“Is it linked to the destruction of the surface?”

"Wow, you actually know something! Yeah, it’s related to the great war. Almost all ancient knowledge was lost and the surface was sealed off. To make things worse, there’s a death invasion from the second underground layer every century, destroying dozens of Academies. It’s only recently that the Association was created in order to fight back."

“Wait, you said something about the death invasion.”

“Hah, I’ll fill you in with the details later, for now, just watch me work.”

Hours passed and Fel grew bored with Mysvain’s eternal tinkering with the runed plated. It was comparable to the coding of the Front, except far more tedious as you had to physically extract and replace the plates.

“Mysvain, how rare are spacial rings?”

“The small ones, with a 10m3 storage or so, aren’t too rare among Mages, or even rich nobles, but the better ones are far more expensive. I heard the number 1 Academy only has a 100m3 ring.”

“Ah, I see. I’ve never seen anyone wear a spacial ring, so I thought they were rare.” Fel conveniently forgot about how large his own ring was.

Mysvain fished out a fine chain necklace from his neck and showed the ring hanging on it, “We don’t wear them on our fingers, too easily stolen.” He then glanced at Fel’s ring, “Though you don’t seem to have that worry.”

Fel let out a long sigh, “Guess I made it too obvious.”

Getting back to his work, Mysvain wore his necklace again, “You’re terrible with subtly asking things, I know you know little about the world, but it’ll get you killed someday.”

“Fine, I’ll read up on a few things when I get time.”

“Good.”

“Um, before you get going again, can I use these parts?”

“Eh? Sure, they’re useless to me.” He rummaged under the table before extracting a worn out book, “Read through this while you mess around, it’s a brief tutorial on how runes work. Just take whatever workbench you need.”

Looking at the dauntingly large book, Fel thanked Mysvain while getting Aerl to archive the information. Only a book spirit would want to read that thing.

Losing interest, Mysvain got back to his work while Fel swept off a workbench and dragged a random pile of runed plates over. He then took out his suit of power armour and lay it on the table. Mysvain, engrossed in his work, filtered out the loud clanging and scraping of metal.

With the assistance of Aerl, Fel deciphered the functions of the various plates and sorted them out into a few different piles. Most of them were reinforcement plates that grew harder when they were fed energy, while the others could absorb, emit or even convert energy into different attributes.

Days passed, and the duo were at work as hard as ever, only pausing to grab a bite to eat. During this time, Fel learned quite a lot from both the book and Mysvain, crafting several rune plates, that, while simple, were rather useful. Though Mysvain eventually noticed the power armour, Fel used the tried and tested story of his strange, isolated village to wiggle his way out of explaining anything.

During this time, their projects had made much progress. But, while Mysvain’s project looked almost identical to its previous state, Fel’s power armour had changed vastly in appearance.

He switched out the elegant, silvery plates with large sheets of grey plates. Fel had faced the smooth side out, to prevent the runes from being damaged, and had tried his best to shape the plates using force energy, though unfortunately, his talent with sculpting was pitiful at best. He would need Siyla to give it some finishing touches.

The outside appearance wasn’t all that had changed. The internals had changed even more. He had switched out all his shock-absorbers and power enhancers with a complicated slew of energy absorbing, emitting and converting runes. The shock-absorbers absorbed the impact and converted it to pure energy while the power enhancers took that energy, or energy from other sources, and converted it into force energy.

However, Fel still wasn’t satisfied. Power armour wasn’t powerful because of brute force alone. It had many assistance systems that helped the pilot along. Balance assists, aim assists and even HUD’s, the list went on and on. But, without the A.I, and like, a computer and screen, he would be without it.

Though he wanted to ask Mysvain about how his mini-plates could help with it, he found that Mysvain was completely immersed in his work, not even paying the slightest attention to Fel’s pleas. Choosing to take the next best option, Fel decided to perfect his reactor and power distribution system.

Time passed slowly and Fel grew bored yet again. Fine tuning the system was boring while Mysvain refused to communicate. He flipped through a few of his books and entertained himself for a bit before the dense words glazed his eyes over. Fel was a curious person who loved learning things, but everything had a limit.

Eventually, while chatting with Aerl, he came up with an amazing idea. He had an A.I right by him, Aerl! Though if Aerl could hear that, and knew what an A.I was, he'd be seriously offended.

“Hey, Aerl, would you like to control this armour and fight cool battles?”

It was Aerl’s dream to be a cool warrior, even if he was just a suit of armour, “Sure! But how?”

Fel fished out a power stone, the very same one that teleported him to the underground, and jammed it into the reactor. He had read that spirits could live in crystals and other valuable objects, from highly reliable sources of course, and didn’t see why it wouldn’t be the same in this case.

“Hop in.”

“What?”

“Go into the crystal.”

“Why would I be able to do that?”

“Why would you be able to hang out in my brain?”

After some thought, Aerl found he may as well give it a shot. He flipped through his books and, after an hour or two, came up with a plan.

“Do you have another crystal or something?”

Fel searched through his storage ring, finding a few crystals, though none of them were up to Aerl’s standards. He continued to rummage around the ring, taking out whatever was small and looked valuable, eventually coming across an old, stone pendant. The one he found on the six-armed skeleton’s person.

“Aerl, would this work?”

“...”

“Hey, Aerl?”

“Huh? Right! This will work great! Where’d you find this?”

“The golden one err, gave it to me. What about it?”

“It’s a spirit weapon!”

“A spirit weapon?”

“Yea! A weapon made for spirits!”

Fel sighed, what did he expect?

“What can you do with it?”

“To be honest, I’m not powerful enough to do a lot with it, but I’ll be able to launch a few psychic attacks with it. But that’s not the best part. If I can stay there, I’ll be able to temper myself and grow more powerful!”

"Can you manipulate energy with it?"

"It would be hard to do so without it."

Fel wiped his brow at how close he came to an embarrassing failure, “Sounds good, so, what do you need me to do with this?”

“Oh right, you need to insert it into the forehead of your helmet.”

“You realise that I can’t do anything that delicate right? I can hardly sculpt a pauldron!" Fel paused, "I’ll need to get Siyla for this.”

Looking at the ‘pauldrons’ that Fel sculpted, Aerl could only agree with that statement, yet, before he could even reply, an arrogant voice rung out through the house.

“Fel Evenstar, I, Invicta Silverwheel, challenge you to a duel!”